Leadership: What's Love Got to Do With It?

Love and leadership are not words that are typically found together in the same sentence. We often apply the notion of love to our personal lives—towards our family and possibly our closest friends—while we apply the notion of leadership to our professional/organizational lives. I find it particularly curious that our tendency as human beings is to restrict the use of the word love to the personal domain and to leave it out of professional, community, and social discourse. Many of us treasure our children and loved ones. However, that is not to say that we cannot have deep, powerful, and transformative relationships with co-workers and professional mentors. It may very well be that our family or romantic relationships are dry (but still important) while we also have relationships with colleagues and persons from our social circle that deeply move and impact us. The notion of love might seem a bit mushy, and, therefore, unprofessional to many of us. So, we do not typically talk about our love for others outside of a family or romantic context. Yet, we inherently know that love can be found everywhere in all social contexts.?

"What's Love Got to Do With It?" - Tina Turner

As a public speaker and leadership studies scholar and expert, I explore the dynamics of love and leadership. I believe that, if we are conscious of our capacity to love, we can use our love to fuel our work. In the words of the late Tina Turner, “What's love got to do, got to do with it?” To answer this question, we need to frame our discussion around relationships. First, why do we form relationships? The short answer to this question is that we form relationships so that we can grow as people. According to M. Scott Peck, love is “the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” If we apply Peck's definition of love, there are an unlimited number of people that we can love as well as an unlimited number of social contexts to love someone. We need others in our lives to not just encourage and champion us, but we also need others to show us what more we can be as people.

Second, what holds organizations, communities, and societies together? The answer is love. Love can augment the quality of our relationships. The spiritual quality of love has implications on how we lead and how we collaborate as people. On a broad level, love brings us together and enables us to access our humanity and collective wisdom. Our collective wisdom is all of our stories, our pain points, our sufferings, our joys, and our knowledge of different subject matter put together.?With collective wisdom, we find the knowledge and drive we need for large-scale change.

"The Power of Love" - Celine Dion

When we have love, we have the power to live our lives with the greatest courage, determination, and intentionality. When we have love for ourselves and for each other, we are in a position to co-create solutions to problems that threaten collective survival–climate change, water pollution, digital disconnect. To solve these challenges, we need the inspiration and the possibilities that loving relationships in community and society bring to our lives. Through the power of love, our collective thinking is ignited to create new possibilities for ourselves and for each other. Therefore, if you want to be a creative maker of change, you must learn to love yourself, to love others, and to love humanity.

"State of the World" - Janet Jackson

The state of the world is not what it once was. Our sense of community has broken down. We can blame social engineering for this. Not too long ago, we used to be organized around extended families. Nowadays, our households are smaller. Our systems of support are weaker. We are not as resilient as we once were. This is only compounded by unfettered free market capitalism–a system that feeds our greed, pettiness, and egotism. This system leads us to further feelings of cynicism and disinterest in the state of the world.?

We rely on technology to solve our problems. However, technology only creates more problems. We think that social media can bolster communities by keeping us connected. Ironically, it disrupts us from our work. It polarizes us and contributes to the growing disconnect and breakdown in the community. Technology cannot change our indifference to one another. Only we can change that.

"We Found Love in a Hopeless Place" - Rihanna

We have survived a global pandemic. Our need for safe-distancing to protect ourselves from sickness has only led to further disconnection. We have forgotten how to spend time with each other because we have been encouraged to stay and work from home. In a time of geopolitical tensions, war, and economic downturns, it is harder in this day and age for many of us to work to feed ourselves and care for our families. Many of us are not getting our basic needs met. Perhaps this is the clarion call for rebuilding our communities. We need each other more than ever. We need love and leadership more than ever.